This goes to show that "your" handle on someone else's platform is never really yours. The only thing that can not be taken away from you is a domain name. Start hosting your voice via your own domain.
Certainly not a 100% fail-safe solution – I see people already listing domains that were seized for various inexcusable reasons – but the Nissan.com case [0] (Nissan the car company vs. Mr. Nissan the run-of-the-mill computer sales guy) comes to mind as a classic (and fascinating) counterexample.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d200...
...but I am often told I'm too optimistic.
>[...] In the Sting decision there was evidence that the Respondent had made bona fide use of the name Sting prior to obtaining the domain name registration and there was no indication that he was seeking to trade on the good will of the well-known singer.
>Because the evidence shows a deliberate attempt by Respondent to trade on Complainant's fame for commercial purposes, we find that Complainant has satisfied the requirements of Paragraph 4(a)(iii) of the Policy.
She got the domain because he couldn't bring up a single non-Madonna-the-Singer reason for plopping $20,000 down to buy the domain.
EDIT: further explanation of the gTLD registry agreement
In the case of "entities with enough power and influence", I don't think any of the ICANN RA requirements make gTLDs any less likely to being seized than any ccTLDs.
Heck, I own a .sg domain, and I don't trust the Singapore government to not overreact if I published anything politically sensitive on it.
Good luck trying to argue in a court that your Instagram path is your legal asset and not Instagrams.
> All registered domains must be set in use within one year, otherwise the .AL Registry has the right to suspend them.
He mentioned that he was able to keep his twitter handle and that's most likely because Twitter doesn't pull this sort of shit. I remember a few years back Israel wanted to the twitter handle "@israel" for their official twitter account, asked twitter and they would not hand it over from the original user. I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.
I've always wondered such deals could just be bait for a user to violate the Twitter terms of service, and therefore free the username up for others to use.
That account had value and this is a poor business practice. Courts award value and the damages are to make a point that its a bad practice if the judge/regulator finds it disturbing. Assuming that the judge / consumer regulator will say "well but you clicked I agree" is a bad assumption, ESPECIALLY when European countries are involved. the company is just as likely to axe that contract logic and just lean on their severability clause to keep the rest of the contract without self-granting the ability to reassign accounts.
Instagram would be in a better place if it generally brokered and escrowed account trading on its platform, and took a fee from that.
in other instances the follower and engagement to the userID is valuable
in other instances a combination of all three is valuable